NHS Eastern Cheshire CCG recognises that radical change must be made soon to the model of health and social care in Eastern Cheshire, given the demands for care services against an increasingly challenging budget.

In the next decade, the health and social care system in England (and the world) will have to contend with an ageing population, increasing numbers of people with complex long-term conditions, budget constraints, increasingly sophisticated (and expensive) treatments and rising expectations of what health and care services should deliver.

The Kings Fund, an independent charity working to improve health and care in England, were asked by the Department of Health to support the development of a national strategy for the promotion of integrated care.

An integrated approach aims to meet these challenges through better co-ordination - or joining up - of health and social care services, reducing the fragmentation or duplication of care, increasing patient satisfaction and decreasing inappropriate hospital admissions.

Our approach to joining up care in Eastern Cheshire is called Caring Together.

Caring Together: Eastern Cheshire

In Eastern Cheshire we recognise that we can only make the required changes by working collaboratively with our partners. This includes our public, our patients, Cheshire East Council and other health, social care and voluntary sector provider organisations.

During 2012-13, we developed an agreed vision for Caring Together:

“Joining up local care for all our wellbeing”.

Caring Together is about:

Supporting people to be able to take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing

Eradicating the gaps between care settings

Creating services that are of the highest quality and meeting best practice standards

Ensuring care services that are safe, sustainable and best value

Collaborative relationships between organisations, teams and professionals and the public

Sharing of information

Delivering the Caring Together campaign

We are adopting a campaign approach to developing and embedding the Caring Together programme in Eastern Cheshire. For the Caring Together culture to be achieved we recognise that we need Caring Together champions throughout all walks of life informing us of their stories of care – good or bad – and to help us shape the future model of care.

We have a dedicated website to our Caring Together programme, which can be found by visiting the following link or typing in to your web browser www.caringtogether.info

Here you will have the opportunity to look over the stories and experiences that have been collected, the newsletters that have been produced and the briefings that have been sent to the media.

Our approach to engagement around joinig up care and involving our local population has also been filmed by the ITN Healthcare News Channel as part of the NHS Alliance conference held in November 2013.

Why not join the campaign to make Caring Together a reality in Eastern Cheshire.

We have also developed an induction video for staff which can be viewed below:

Join Caring Together

Connecting Care in Cheshire: three localities, one ambition

In November 2013, it was announced by Care and Support Minister Norman Lamb MP that Cheshire has been selected as one of the 14 national pioneer integration areas under the Department of Health’s flagship scheme for joining up health and social care services.

The integration ‘pioneers’ have been identified by an internationally renowned panel of experts on integration as being areas that are well set to transform the way health and care is being delivered to patients and their families. The transformation is seen to be through bringing services closer together than ever before to provide better support at home and earlier treatment in the community to prevent people needing emergency care in hospital or care homes. It is this approach which the Government wants to see spread across the country.

Connecting Care in Cheshire will build on the strong local partnerships and programmes already in place to join-up services, providing a much more efficient, responsive and customer-focused service for local people. The joint approach will look to address the following:

reducing the repetition and duplication – “I don’t want to tell people six times’

no one falls through the gaps - “We didn’t know who was responsible for what”

an end to revolving door syndrome – “Dad was in and out of hospital and care homes more often that he needed to be”

coordinated home visits – “I wanted to be there to support my mum as she is uncomfortable with strangers coming into the house, but it meant I had to take time off work”

discharge from hospital at the right time with the right support – “Dad wanted to come home and we wanted him home, but it took ages”

Click on the following link to see the presentation about the Connecting Care in Cheshire approach.

It is intended that learning from the ‘Integrated Care pioneers ‘will be shared nationally, with the aim of making integrated care and support the norm and to end disjointed care within the next five years. The ambition is to help all areas across the country deliver integrated care and support. This will improve experiences and outcomes for people who use care and support services.

Click here to read a Digital Roadmap explaining how health and social care partners are working together to use technology to make services as accessible, effective and efficient as possible.

Cheshire Care Record

Cheshire Pioneer Bulletin

The Connecting Care Across Cheshire Pioneer Programme Director bulletin provides information on progress and developments for the programme, as well as information on the most useful and relevant resources to help Pioneer partners and readers stay abreast of local and national news.